Bob Dylan - Infidels (1983)

Infidels was the first secular record Bob Dylan recorded since Street Legal, & it's far more like a classicist Dylan album than that one, filled with songs that are evocative in their imagery & direct in their approach. This is lean, much like Slow Train Coming, but its writing is closer to Dylan's peak of the mid-'70s, & some of the songs here -- particularly on the first side -- are minor classics, capturing him reviving his sense of social consciousness & his gift for poetic, elegant love songs.For a while, Infidels seems like a latter-day masterpiece, but toward the end of the record it runs out of steam, preventing itself from being a triumph. Still, in comparison to everything that arrived in the near-decade before it, Infidels is a triumph, finding Dylan coming tantalizingly close to regaining all his powers. ~Allmusic